Tag Archives | Carmen Segarra

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is one of the world’s most powerful financial regulators, charged by Congress and the Federal Reserve Board with keeping Wall Street’s gargantuan banks from crashing the economy. But the public has little ability to witness how the nation’s top bank supervisor performs this vital work. By law and custom, what goes on inside the New York Fed is a closely guarded secret.

Last year that changed when I took readers inside this cloistered institution and revealed something that only a select few have experienced. I obtained a remarkable set of secret recordings of examiners and their bosses on the job, recordings that financial writer Michael Lewis dubbed “the Ray Rice video for the financial sector.”

Secrecy World

Jake Bernstein was a senior reporter on the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) team that broke the Panama Papers story. In 2017, the project won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting and was a finalist in International Reporting. Bernstein earned his first Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting in 2011 for coverage of the financial crises.
He has written for The Washington Post, Bloomberg, Mother Jones, The Guardian, ProPublica, Vice and has appeared on the BBC, NBC, CNN, PBS, and NPR.

Pulitzer Prize Winning Series

The Wall Street Money Machine Enticed by profits and bonuses, Wall Street took advantage of complicated mortgage-based instruments to reap billions, only to exacerbate the eventual crash.

The Magnetar Trade: How One Hedge Fund Helped Keep the Bubble Going
The hedge fund Magnetar helped create mortgage-based securities, pushed for risky things to go inside them and then bet against the investments, resulting in billions in losses for investors and ultimately making the financial crisis worse. It’s a story of the perverse incentives and reckless behavior that characterized the last days of the boom. Read the story